Citizen Kane (Screen and Cinema)

The complete screenplay of one of the world’s most famous and controversial films

“A definitive chronicle of the making of the film” Sheridan Morley, Films & Filming

This is the complete companion to Citizen Kane – the film that was “designed to shock” (Kenneth Tynan) – one of the best-loved and best-known movies in the history of Hollywood and still the most staggering film debut ever. Not only was this Orson Welles’s first film as actor and director but most of the cast were also new to the cinema. Yet so controversial was the subject matter that an $842,000 bribe and the concentrated wrath of the Hearst newspaper empire combined in an attempt to strangle its distribution. And the authorship of the film is still a subject of conflict.

Pauline Kael’s long essay, “Raising Kane”, dissects a maze of Hollywood lore to re-evaluate these and many other fascinating stories about the making of this remarkable film. Her account is followed by the original screenplay, illustrated with stills and frame enlargements.

“Citizen Kane revolutionised film-making, and the question of its authorship is as important to the cinema as that of Hamlet to the theatre … Pauline Kael explains how the picture came to be made and concludes that the man most responsible for its creation was not Welles but Herman J. Mankiewicz” Kenneth Tynan, Observer